Objective:
Determine the dominant chemical and physical processes controlling the fate of agriculturally relevant chemicals in the environment using measurements of fundamental chemical properties, field collection to measure ambient pollutant levels, and improvement of existing environmental fate models as a means to develop new management practices.

Approach:
This project will build on existing cooperative research projects with the University of Maryland Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Through our combined efforts, we will build and carry out research on three major projects. The first will involve studies of manure byproducts, their mitigation and fate, focusing initially on veterinary wastes, including anti-microbials; the second will be to determine the movement and impact of atmospherically transported chemicals and odoriferous compounds on the environment and the third will be to investigate the environmental fate of other personal care products that occur in urban and agricultural products. This work will include laboratory studies of fundamental chemical and physical properties, controlled laboratory studies to measure degradation rates and partition coefficients under environmentally relevant conditions, small-scale and large-scale field measurements of ambient pollutant concentrations, and utilization of these data in predictive modeling efforts and development of predictive models.